Audit: Final First Tennessee Park Cost Was $91M

An audit totals the cost of First Tennessee Park, home of the Nashville Sounds (Class AAA; Pacific Coast League), at $91 million — a cost that includes infrastructure costs and spending to removed contaminated soil from the ballpark site.

The ballpark project was pushed by former Mayor Karl Dean with a price tag of $60 million, but that cost ended up at $69.9 million after accounting for increased costs due to an unexpected cold construction season and an expedited schedule. This cost overrun isn’t a surprise and was announced shortly after the ballpark opened.

The addition $21.2 million, however, wasn’t tallied before the audit. Much of it was inevitable, however, for whatever development happened at the site: underused as parking, the area north of downtown was ripe for development. Indeed, the former fallow area is now attracting all sorts of development, ranging from housing to retail and other mixed uses. From The Tennessean:

But the overall cost of the project increased further because of $21.2 million in other related work needed to make the Sulphur Dell stadium site in North Nashville ready for development.

This included $9.5 million for a new greenway outside the ballpark; $5.6 million in infrastructure around the stadium for street paving, sidewalks and electrical work; $3.6 million in improvements to address flooding and $1.7 million in water and sewer work.

These costs were paid for with existing Metro capital funds.

The ballpark was backed by increases sales taxes in the area, property-tax revenues from new projects, and the proceeds of a TIF district encompassing the ballpark area.

Categories

Categories

About Ballpark Digest

August Publications was formed in 2002 with the launch of Ballpark Digest. Since that time the company has grown from a single employee working out of a home to a diversified publishing firm featuring Websites, books and other merchandise. Our motto is simple: We enjoy doing cool things and are overjoyed we can make a living doing so.